PROMs or Patient Reported Outcomes Measures and are a patient-led assessment of health – telling us how the patient feels they are doing. Patients are asked ‘How are you today?’ alongside questions based on the procedure(s) being undertaken which are validated tools calculate a numerical score. The data is collected before and after treatment to assess a quantifiable difference.

Our community based in Northumbria Healthcare Trust have initiated a project to move from paper-based collection of thousands of records to an online system with the hope of improving analytics in the long term and in turn improve patient outcomes.

PROMs scores are important to national bodies such as NHS England, GIRFT as well as Trusts and Commisioners. Clinicians and consultants can analyse the data and understand what is working well in any given specialism. Research and development teams can use the data to improve treatments and tools used to better improve patient outcomes.

A working open source prototype ‘HealthTRaK’ has been produced to simplify PROMs recording and follows tow simple steps:

• Enter procedure details -> automatically generates appropriate PROMs follow ups pre and post op
• Collect PROMs responses -> view, filter and export data

The system has calculations and data analysis tools built in and they are working towards the potential of having an online or app-based version of the tool in the future

Testing is now underway in Northumbria to collect foot an ankle surgery data as a pilot and to refine the solution moving forward. Other specialisms will be added in due course

The community welcomes new members and can be found via https://code4health.org/HealthTRAK_PROMs